S3 Graphics' future hung in the balance since June 2011, when its parent company VIA Technologies announced sale of its stake in it. Since then, it's been a word on the wires, that smartphone maker HTC has been in the fray to buy it out, since it is facing IP turbulence with Apple. HTC and Apple used S3 Graphics (September 2011) and AMD (November 2011), respectively, as proxies in their patent infringement battles. It emerged out of the patent spat, that S3 Graphics holds a handy bouquet of graphics IP, and HTC announced that it is now back on track to acquire it.

Smartphone giant HTC backed S3 Graphics' claims to certain graphics-related patents in the patent infringement case against Apple. "We think S3's patent portfolio is valid and strong, and we have decided to complete the purchase of S3 after cautious assessment," HTC's general counsel Grace Lei said, at an annual shareholders' general meeting. S3 Graphics currently owns about 270 patents, some of which are licensed to Sony Corp., Nintendo Co. and Microsoft Corp., Lei added.

and whats stopping them from finding these people? Im sure there are a lot of ex-amd & Nvidia staff floating around that know what they are talking about and are willing to share their knowledge if the price is right.

by: james888I think it would be great to get another graphics competitor.

I think we're in more desperate need of another CPU competitor right now, but yeah, another graphics competitor might be cool.

It is possible to have too many though - when you have many similar sized firms all competing with each other, the reduced rate of progress caused by smaller R&D departments can actually undo any benefit from the increased competition.

Also, the PC graphics sector isn't particularly tempting to muscle in on right now. Increasingly excellent integrated graphics will continue to erode the market for low-end chips, and in the gaming and high-end sectors Nvidia and AMD are extremely tough competition, with their massive R&D, experience, reputation, patent portfolios (pains me to say that one) and links in the industry (e.g. TSMC loyalty, AIB partners etc.).

I really wish that S3 would make a big comeback. Even if they take just on low and mid end segment (not many can deal with top end). I mean, every competition is welcome and S3 used to be pretty good. The old and rather crappy S3 Savage3D with just 8MB of memory was running Unreal games better and with better image quality than many "more powerful" cards at the time.
The latest Chrome chips were not bad, they just needed some more advertising which they had none at all.

remember the days when S3 were pretty badass in making IGPs???? It would be interesting if they were dong that again. Would be interesting to see them go up against some of the intel IGPs and possibly some of AMDs APU's

by: FreedomEclipseremember the days when S3 were pretty badass in making IGPs???? It would be interesting if they were dong that again. Would be interesting to see them go up against some of the intel IGPs and possibly some of AMDs APU's

I think most people in this thread don't realize that S3 makes the PowerVR series of mobile GPUs. They'll never be making a comeback into the desktop segment. Right now S3 is the king of SoC graphics, along with Qualcomm and their Adreno lineup. Nvidia and ARM are also relevant, if not dominant.

What this means is that HTC will start using their PowerVR IP to differentiate themselves from Apple, Samsung, and the rest. Samsung has been doing fairly well with ARM's Mali 400 for the past generation and a half, so I'm assuming they'll stick with them. LG tends to use Qualcomm and Nvidia SoCs, so they're not particularly interesting here either.

The two big unknowns I see are Motorola (and anyone else that uses TI's OMAP application processors), and Apple. Both relied heavily on PowerVR graphics in the past, and both are direct competitors to HTC. I assume HTC and Motorola will work out some sort of cross licensing agreement, but I'm not sure if Apple will be willing to. If they don't, I'm guessing Apple will start using the same Mali graphics in recent Samsung flagships, or possibly start buying complete Qualcomm SoCs with Adreno graphics. The first option is the one I think is more likely, as well as more interesting.

If Apple does end up going with ARM's GPU, it's going to be going back to the days of the iPhone 4 and Galaxy S, where Apple and Samsung had almost identical hardware, but with very different software to distinguish them. Now that iOS is looking more and more like Android, and TouchWiz is looking more and more like iOS, and Android is rapidly approaching iOS-level smoothness, there really isn't going to be that much separating Samsung from Apple. That's an outcome Apple won't tolerate, so we will be able to count on something big coming from Apple in the near future (much bigger than Siri, which no one uses for more than a day and had already existed in a similar form on both Android and iOS for ages). What this big thing could be, I have no idea, but I'm eager to see.

Of course, this is all just idle speculation, but I do so enjoy speculating.

by: deletedI think most people in this thread don't realize that S3 makes the PowerVR series of mobile GPUs. They'll never be making a comeback into the desktop segment. Right now S3 is the king of SoC graphics, along with Qualcomm and their Adreno lineup. Nvidia and ARM are also relevant, if not dominant.

What this means is that HTC will start using their PowerVR IP to differentiate themselves from Apple, Samsung, and the rest. Samsung has been doing fairly well with ARM's Mali 400 for the past generation and a half, so I'm assuming they'll stick with them. LG tends to use Qualcomm and Nvidia SoCs, so they're not particularly interesting here either.

The two big unknowns I see are Motorola (and anyone else that uses TI's OMAP application processors), and Apple. Both relied heavily on PowerVR graphics in the past, and both are direct competitors to HTC. I assume HTC and Motorola will work out some sort of cross licensing agreement, but I'm not sure if Apple will be willing to. If they don't, I'm guessing Apple will start using the same Mali graphics in recent Samsung flagships, or possibly start buying complete Qualcomm SoCs with Adreno graphics. The first option is the one I think is more likely, as well as more interesting.

If Apple does end up going with ARM's GPU, it's going to be going back to the days of the iPhone 4 and Galaxy S, where Apple and Samsung had almost identical hardware, but with very different software to distinguish them. Now that iOS is looking more and more like Android, and TouchWiz is looking more and more like iOS, and Android is rapidly approaching iOS-level smoothness, there really isn't going to be that much separating Samsung from Apple. That's an outcome Apple won't tolerate, so we will be able to count on something big coming from Apple in the near future (much bigger than Siri, which no one uses for more than a day and had already existed in a similar form on both Android and iOS for ages). What this big thing could be, I have no idea, but I'm eager to see.

Of course, this is all just idle speculation, but I do so enjoy speculating.

First of april was 8 weeks ago!
Still, this was one of the funniest posts I've read this year.